Garage gate steering & position detecting with ESP8266 (Intro)

Source of this picture here

Last month a very interesting idea came to my mind - steering my garage gate remotely using phone, laptop, web service or anything and get notified when the gate is open for too long time, e.g. 20 min, or when it is opened at night, or when we are not at home.

The idea brilliant, don't you think? Yeah, maybe but I'm rather software developer and fledgling electronics :-) I have some electronics background etc. but I'm not deep inside all this Arduino, sensors etc. stuff. So as a good one-man R&D, I've started from research. Unfortunately I didn't find too much about gate steering besides expensive and huge solutions generally delivered by gates manufacturer. This is definitely not what I'm looking for. So I've started on different way. I broke down my idea into few block. Look below.

Yes, this is very simple but worth all words.

A short explanation of the requirements I have. Some day I woke up and went to my garage, to drive by car to my work. I went there and my garage gate was opened! Whole night... I noticed that the button of remote control is so sensitive that I accidentally pressed it when I was hiding the remote control. It happened more than one time. That's the real reason. I don't want to sit down in front of the gate checking if it was accidentally opened.

So first thing I've done was to check how to detect gate position. My gate manufacturer is Wiśniowski (well known polish manufacturer). I don't have my gate photos, so I've found some in the Internet showing the gate and mechanism. Examples below.

I've searched over many solutions, starting from optical sensors checking the lines drawn on some paper or plastic tapes like below:

Source of the picture here

It seemed to be complicated and quite difficult to adopt to garage gate where dust and dirt can appear. So I was digging more. Looking on many other optical solutions, distance detectors etc. I decided to be as simple as possible (I was looking also some cheap solution). So I found, in my electronics part "storage", a multi rotation potentiometer. looking like this:

This was exactly what I was searching for. I needed a way to transfer gate position to some electrical/digital signal. So maybe potentiometer? Why not. I needed also potentiometer rotating many times, not simple potentiometer as this one

Source of picture here

So this multi-rotating potentiometer was excellent. The problem was how to connect it to gate. It was impossible for me, so I bought different potentiometer with a gear:

Now I could somehow trigger the rotation of it. So this was a rather mechanical stuff to make potentiometer rotating when my gate is going down or up. The good way is too show you how the gate is working in general.

Source o the picture here

And this is it. As we can see there is a rotating metal pipe/rod above the entrance:

And this rod is rotating around 7-10 times when the gate is opening or closing. So my potentiometer should be sufficient cause it can be rotated 23 times: ~1...100kOhms. 

Just quick clarification, the project is currently in the state of concept. I'm collecting knowledge and stuff. And of course sharing this with you :-)

And here is the plan how to connect gate mechanism with potentiometer. Look below.

So yeah, that's the plan. This is rather the simpler part. There is much to work, especially that I don't have too big knowledge about digital electronics. I think I'm gone make it due to my motivation. I just need this solution and the ready-to-use solutions on the market are too expensive for me...

So thank you, in the next part I will show how I plan to connect this potentiometer with a module I bought on AliExpress: NodeMCU ESP8266, the one shown below.

Great module, by the way. So thanks for reading and stay tuned, next posts will reveal much more...